Musings on Feminist Theory, Field Research & Finding Myself while Attempting to Survive Graduate School.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Nightmares

Author's note: Many of the photos below are extremely graphic.

I have suffered from nightmares since before I can
remember. My mom has told me that I used
to wake up as a toddler with what my pediatrician diagnosed as “night terrors”. I remember always being afraid to go to
sleep. I am still not sure what set this off, or even if there is a catalytic
event or root cause, whathaveyou- I just know that a) I was always scared in my
bed at night; b) I woke up screaming not infrequently from the time I was a toddler
until I got a dog and trained her as an emotional support animal based on my doctor’s recommendation at the age of
twenty-five; c) that my parents got zero sleep while I was young (my ever sensitive
father has pinned their divorce on my proclivity for nighttime hysterics...classy).

While I can’t pin point a specific nexus for my nightmares,
when I was slogging through style 'processing' the aftermath of my rape Dr. Phil style (read:
having mild existential crisis realizing that from age 15-25 the majority of my
actions- overeating, defensive attitude, self-defeating behaviors- had been an
attempt to avoid confronting my feelings of powerlessness about the assault) my
nightmares reached a fever pitch. On and
off for two years my partner had to endure me waking up alternatively
screaming, sobbing, or so soaked in cold sweat that I would have to change PJs
and sopping wet sheets between 2-4am. With
the help of our good friends at Pfizer and my dog this has greatly subsided.

Now that the imagined terrors have, for the most part,
subsided (I still have them from time to time, but have a better tool kit to
deal with them now*), I apparently have mental bandwidth to entertain horrors
that are more plausible.

Jessica Stern, one of the world’s preeminent researchers on terrorism, has writtenextensively that
one of the side effects of the aftermath of being sexually assaulted was an
ability to disassociate herself emotionally in terrifying situations. She attributes some of her ability tointerview terrorists and study the topic extensively to the fact that she can detach
her intellectual processing abilities from her emotional responses. For the ten years between being assaulted (date
rape by my first boyfriend, for those of you who fall into the asinine ‘forcible
rape’ distinction camp) and coming to grips with the emotional toll it took on
me, I completely iced over my ability to feel.
This had many, many fun side effects- destructive overeating to the
point of pre-diabetes and high blood pressure meds at age 19, lashing out
horrifically at my mom and sister, hyper defensiveness in my personal
relationships- but it also seems to have forged a distinct ability to detach
myself in academic settings when studying particularly disturbing social phenomena.

I remember being completely calm and feeling
numb, almost clinical, walking through Tuol Sleng, S-21, in downtown
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s regime processed an estimated 14,000
people- including children- who were put to death in the killing fields just
outside of the city. It was a purely fact finding exercise. Staring
at skulls and photos of wives and children of government ministers who were killed in Pol
Pot’s “pull the grass up by the roots” strategy to avoid the risk of having family
members later avenge the killing of their husbands and fathers, I felt a detached
calmness. Being in the space where
ministers and other ‘enemies of the state’ where held, in what had previously
functioned as a public high school, I had no goose bumps, felt no shock. I felt no nothing. Flat line.

Artistic depiction of Khmer Rouge soldiers 'pulling the grass up by the roots'. In this case, perfecting their aim on moving targets using children for practice.

In case it's not clear what is happening in above painting...here's a close up.

Stalin's network of GULAG camps

I recently visited the GULAG History Museum (GULAG is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei- Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps) in downtown Moscow.
Couched between some of the highest end restaurants and shops in the
city, caddy corner to a Louis Vuitton boutique, this tiny museum houses
artifacts of a few of the estimated 20 million people that Stalin exiled to the
outermost regions of Russia for crimes ranging from being a suspected threat to
communism (including one war hero who had been awarded multiple medals of valor
for his service during the Great Patriotic War- WWII- a year prior to his imprisonment)
to stealing a bottle of vodka at 14 years old.

Comrade Stalin watching over a camp.

Men and teenaged boys were put to work building a network of railways
that would link the northern regions of the country- ostensibly for the purpose
of securing the northern border (from polar bears???)- actions many academics
now theorize were intended to link the systems of GULAG prison camps scattered about the
vast expanse of the country.

Women,
often imprisoned along with their young children, were

Survivor's depiction of hearings.

shut into vast bread
baking factories and manufacturing plants, frequently never to be united or
know the fate of the husbands, fathers, brothers, nephews and friends who had
been carted off under the pretense of protecting the state. One man featured in a (very well produced)
documentary presented by the museum was taken one year after he and his wife
were married, six days after their son was born. He was charged in the morning, and by the
evening was 70 kilometers outside of Moscow. He has never seen his wife or son
since.

Survivor's depiction of camp interior.

Staring up at artwork made by former prisoners, peering
through glass displays at baby shoes of a little girl who grew up in the camps
from age two until adolescence, and walking through the replica of a camp bunker,
the only response I could muster was to mutter “same story, different locale”
to the friends who had joined my expedition to the museum. I don’t know that this is actually due to an
ability to detach when confronted with horrific information, or that I simply
have lost the ability to be shocked by the fact that human beings can inflict
such atrocities against their fellows after witnessing so much
evidence.

GULAG survivor's depiction of executions.

I distinctly remember taking out from the library each and
every book I could find on snakes- the only animal that freaks me out- when I was in
second grade. If only I could know everything about them, then they wouldn’t
be as scary. My possibly morbid quest to
engage academically with mass violence is motivated by a desire to demystify,
and thus find an antidote, to the root causes of genocide and repression. Getting
to the bottom of what catalyzes such actions- and keeps others from blowing the
whistle on such actions- must yield a remedy to future horrors.

Right?

Perhaps the answer is no.
Perhaps simply knowing about history is not enough to avoid repeating it
again. It’s not like mass violence is not still happening, albeit perhaps in
less efficient or organized forms, in parts of the world today. Despite
museums, memorials, and education programs exist to plead “never again”, it
seems that the world repeatedly stands by while the powerful smite those who
present a threat to their stranglehold on authority.

Memorial to victims of Pol Pot's S-21.

It’s something to lose sleep over.

*I am happy to share some of the resources I have found helpful. Please feel free to email me if you are struggling with nightmares or PTSD related symptoms.

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Twenty-something grad student at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. My research interests include exploring how societal perceptions of rape and gendered violence are formed and public policy and legal responses to gendered violence.